Book Club: Kafka’s Metamorphosis and the Ministry of the Dark Arts
Jordan Pickering
I knew a guy who was converted through the ministry of a drug rehab centre. During one of their arts sessions, he got into trouble with his mentor for painting skulls and other dark symbols. He was trying to paint his transformation. His mentor saw it as depicting evil.
Christianity and the arts lock horns because art often explores human darkness. For many, Christianising the arts demands that we only depict the light, or that we always provide those in the dark a roadmap to redemption. The purpose of Christian art is to paint the parting in the clouds, to sound the gospel’s distinctive note of hope. Darkness is an obvious adversary in Christian art, but is this its only role? Can Christians make art like The Metamorphosis?
Kafkaesque
Franz Kafka is renowned for his weird, dreamlike stories featuring alienated protagonists who are slowly whittled away by the brutality of indifference. His most famous work, The Metamorphosis, tells the story of a young man named Gregor who had been thrust into the role of breadwinner after his father’s business failed. He wakes one morning to find that he has become a giant, ungainly cockroach. In one moment, Gregor moves from provider, rescuer, cherished brother and selfless son, to loathsome insect, inhuman, revolting, a disturbance of every peace. His terrified family confine him to his room, with only his sister briefly interested in exploring whether and what he will eat. As terror yields to disgust, and disgust yields to irritation, his family spend the days and weeks musing about what might be done about this inconvenience. One morning the housekeeper discovers Gregor’s lifeless husk in his room, a fact that the family marks with a brief moment of solemnity. They leave the house to enjoy some free air, returning to the announcement that “the business of getting rid of that thing next door” has been seen to. Without their son’s earnings, each family member has found that they are eminently employable after all and, being relieved of their burden, they leave the troubled house and start a happy and prosperous life elsewhere.
Kafka was a troubled man and died young of tuberculosis. He had a strained relationship with a brash, demanding father, doubting his own worth so deeply that he burned most of what he wrote. We know what it is to be Kafkaesque because the executor of his will disobeyed his dying wish to destroy the rest. Kafka was not a painter of the light and not a bringer of hope. So, should a Christian read The Metamorphosis, and more to the point, could a Christian write such a story?
Christians in the dark
Art is first of all a window. Marcel Proust observes: “Through art we can know another’s view of the universe.” It’s important to read Kafka because it is a window into Kafka’s world. It is easy for those in the dark to appear monstrous to us, to lose their human form, unless we learn to inhabit their worlds and to understand what makes them. Reading grows empathy and empathy is its own kind of light.
However, before we’re finished understanding Kafka, we’re typically already building pulpits by which to preach our answer to his darkness. Yet art is not a pulpit and it’s not merely a window; art is a mirror, and so it is important that we understand not just Kafka but Gregor the bug too.
Christian artists are often anxious to present truth in their work, and what could be truer than the true story of the whole world, the gospel? There is a pressure, therefore, to make art that reflects the gospel to the world. As good as this may be, it reconceives art as a kind of metaphysics, as snapshots of a total redemptive worldview. But The Metamorphosis is not a metaphysics. It is not what Kafka thinks the world is or how it ought to be. It is not a total story and yet it is a true one.
The Metamorphosis is a family story – a small, fiercely painful reflection of estrangement and disgust and relational disrepair. Gregor goes through a transformation but not a transfiguration, and there are many real-world people whose unhappy circumstances likewise remain unchanged. For some, the darkness does not lift, the clouds do not break. We’re never given a peek behind the metaphor of Kafka’s bug. As many have observed, it might mirror the experience of the disabled, the ill, the aged, but Kafka refuses to give it a familiar face. The real world is full of people whose humanity has slipped, and whose presence now disturbs my peace. For many people – too many – Gregor’s ending is where their story ends too.
It is in this kind of mirroring that the prophetic role of dark art emerges. Redemption is a wonderful story and Christians pursue a hope that is unique in the world, but redemption is not the only true story. When every story that Christians tell resolves in redemption, when we offer easy answers to questions that may really have no solution at all, such mirrors start to lose their ring of truth. Human experience encompasses both day and night. Dawn is a certainty but, even for Christians, it is not given to everyone to see the dawn rise. There are phases of life in which darkness and lament must be lived and lived to the full. It is a false friend who can only laugh with those who laugh and never mourn with those who mourn. Stories of despair are not (or not necessarily) telling us the untruth of a world without hope. Rather, they can be a visceral awakening to the truth that hope and happiness are no one’s birthright.
One searches in vain for any relief from Kafka’s picture of despair, but it is not the mirror of Gregor the bug that we’re left with, but that of his family – the ones who paradoxically do experience a happy resolution and a new dawn. Gregor was robbed of his humanity, but the happy ending for his family only masks their greater inhumanity. A black mirror it may be, but it is one with which Christian theology reverberates too. Kafka tells us that we are without excuse – endings will only ever be dark unless we relearn enough humanity to renounce self, to embrace our real-world Gregors and to write them a different ending.
Jordan Pickering is Director of Media at KLC, an Associate Editor of TBP and an Associate Fellow of the KLC.
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Francisco Goya was a Spanish court painter whose work became increasingly dark and pessimistic following the loss of his hearing, the death of his wife and the atrocities he witnessed in the Peninsula War. In c.1814 he created a series of etchings called The Disaster of War, depicting, among other things, the murder of clerics while French soldiers looted their churches (above: This is How it Happened). In seclusion later in life, he made his so-called “black paintings” directly onto the walls of his house, including Saturn Devouring his Son (below). As bleak as such works are, the horrible truths they tell about humanity aren’t a far cry from the harsh words of biblical prophets.
